Vividly highlights the deep and lasting impact of injustice.
It’s 1973 in Montgomery, Alabama, and when a Black nurse realizes her young patients are being shockingly mistreated, a lawsuit reveals the systemic horror taking place.
After graduating as a nurse, Civil Townsend starts work at a family planning clinic in pursuit of her dream of empowering poor Black women. Civil is assigned two young sisters, 13-year-old Erica and 11-year-old India Williams, as off-site patients—she’ll visit them at home periodically to give them injections of Depo-Provera. Civil becomes deeply invested in the Williams family, helping them move out of their squalid sharecropper cabin into an apartment and helping the girls’ widowed father find a new job that doesn’t require him to be literate. But soon Civil’s ex-boyfriend Tyrell Ralsey tells her that Depo-Provera hasn’t been approved by the Food and Drug Administration, and she starts looking into whether the clinic’s patients are being coerced into care without full information. Civil’s concern for the autonomy of others is juxtaposed against her secret choice to have an illegal abortion, which she’s never fully worked through emotionally despite Ty’s attempts at conversation. When the clinic’s White director takes over the Williams girls’ care and makes an irreversible decision, Civil is thrust into a world of lawsuits and Senate hearings in an effort to seek justice. Author Perkins-Valdez deftly balances an older Civil, now an OB-GYN, acting as the first-person narrator with a young Civil experiencing the emotional weight of these events in real time. The older Civil’s narration, as she tells the story in 2016 to her own daughter, not only explains the trauma that Erica and India experienced, but also allows her to explain why even though she returned to medical school and dedicated herself to a career focused on the intersections of race, class, ability, and reproductive choice, after more than 40 years she still feels she must return to seek the Williamses’ forgiveness. Inspired by real events, this work of historical fiction admirably balances moral complexity with affecting characters.
Vividly highlights the deep and lasting impact of injustice.Pub Date: April 12, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-33769-1
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: March 15, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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